[Holy] Anyone found soft "caps" to Spirit and Haste amouns?

Title about says it all but I am currently running on the current stat weighting system:

Spirit >> Haste >>>>>>>>>>>>> Crit >> Mastery

However, I am trying to find out if there are any "soft cap" amounts for either Spirit or Haste that, once you hit this level, then it would be more beneficial to stop reforging Mastery and Crit into them. Elitist Jerks is strangely silent about this except to say that you have enough Spirit if you can "finish the fight not OOM." While true, this it not exactly helpful.

Since the hard GCD cap (1.0) seconds it not really achievable with the non-instant heals we cast most (Holy Light, Divine Light), what level of Haste are many Holy Paladins going with.

I am currently sitting at about 2200 Spirit and 1300 Haste having reforged on every piece if they are not Spirit/Haste pieces. What levels to other Healadins see as being "good enough" to then move onto Crit.

Cheers,

I'll be frank. The reason that EJ is silent about a Spirit 'soft cap' is because it's completely different for every person. They're completely right in saying that once you can finish the fight not oom you have enough Spirit. The only way to figure that out is to test it yourself and see what you're comfortable with as everyone's raid is different.

There is no Haste cap and the soft-cap is unreachable to the best of my knowledge. Afaik only classes with their own large Haste buffs that stack with Heroism are capable of reaching the 1sec gcd (Moonkin Druids being the only one that springs to mind with Nature's Grace).

Levantine wrote:I'll be frank. The reason that EJ is silent about a Spirit 'soft cap' is because it's completely different for every person. They're completely right in saying that once you can finish the fight not oom you have enough Spirit. The only way to figure that out is to test it yourself and see what you're comfortable with as everyone's raid is different.

There is no Haste cap and the soft-cap is unreachable to the best of my knowledge. Afaik only classes with their own large Haste buffs that stack with Heroism are capable of reaching the 1sec gcd (Moonkin Druids being the only one that springs to mind with Nature's Grace).

Hmmm...I was afraid that was the answer. I see some Healadins saying that they are comfortable with 1800 Spirit and able to use those other 400 secondary points on other stats but I sit at 2200 and am often low on mana by the end of a Heroic encounter (my first raid night is tonight of Cata).

So, Blizzard may have actually succeeded in creating a spec where not only is there no rotation, but also there is no set gearing pattern to follow. Sure, Spirit is better than Haste is better than Crit/Mastery but by how much and the exact ratios are open to interpertation.

Better in some way, more uncertain in others.

Thanks for the answer.

Cheers,

Personally I try to get as much spirit as I can. This basically means going for spirit items in every slot except trinkets (although intellect is still king so higher itemlevel items without spirit can be better).

I don't think there is really any point where the other secondary stats become as valuable as spirit, as the increased mana spirit allows you to use will increase your throughput more than a similar amount of haste or crit will do (at least until you can spam divine lights without going oom).

There probably are softcaps or plateaus for haste and I really need to check those out, but they are there for more Holy Radiance ticks. Might be useful to reforge to crit if you get to such a plateau, but I doubt even then that going for crit after reaching the plateau is really better.

Sagedin wrote:I don't think there is really any point where the other secondary stats become as valuable as spirit, as the increased mana spirit allows you to use will increase your throughput more than a similar amount of haste or crit will do (at least until you can spam divine lights without going oom).

Pretty much this.
Switching a HL cast to a FoL is going to give you a lot more emergency burst than any amount of haste. Similarly being able to switch a HL into a DL is going to give a lot more throughput than any amount of crit.

And if you're in a position where you can spam DL when you need to, and end the fight with mana, then congrats, you already out-gear the content you're running.

rodos wrote:

Sagedin wrote:I don't think there is really any point where the other secondary stats become as valuable as spirit...[snip]

Switching a HL cast to a FoL is going to give you a lot more emergency burst than any amount of haste. Similarly being able to switch a HL into a DL is going to give a lot more throughput than any amount of crit.

Ahhhh, I had not yet thought about it in this way but you are 100% correct. I was thinking in old Wrath terms that more Haste is the way to increase throughput.

But, being able to cast your expensive, high throughput spells more often is the much better, correct way to increase throughput.

Sure, do I still want to be able to cast a mass number of Holy Light spells quickly (Haste) in order to conserve mana? Yes I do. But, more mana will allow me to "ramp up" my healing when needed by using FoL and DL more than any amount of Haste will.

Thanks for the change in mindset. Just what I was looking for when I started this thread.

Cheers,

Sagedin wrote:I don't think there is really any point where the other secondary stats become as valuable as spirit...[snip]

I think the issue is that the "primary stats" are far above the the secondary stats in terms of item budget cost vs benefits.

With enough crit/hast you could maintain a HS/HL rotation to keep a tank "full" resorting to the DL only on the "soft enrage" times. But the crit/haste rating needed is so high that i believe that as is, when we get to T14, we are still reforging into spirit to be able to spam DL's...

P.S. Let me reforce that this is my point of View.
P.P.S. This makes me a sad panda... why can't we have very complicated stat priority, that makes your head hurt but it gives you options...

Here's a question.

Which would be better
ilvl 359 Haste/Crit item (assume crit is reforged to spirit)
or
346 Spirit/Haste one?

The 359 will have a little more int, but the 346 would get you quite a bit more spi.

Just wondering. Thanks!

My inclination is that for a weapon, the 359 wins because the haste/crit/spirit really isn't very high on a weapon and the bonus sp easily wins. But on normal armor slots, it seems a little trickier. I'm inclined to think the properly itemized 346 one would win, but it seems hard to tell.

Aanar wrote:Here's a question.

Which would be better
ilvl 359 Haste/Crit item (assume crit is reforged to spirit)
or
346 Spirit/Haste one?

The 359 will have a little more int, but the 346 would get you quite a bit more spi.

Just wondering. Thanks!

My inclination is that for a weapon, the 359 wins because the haste/crit/spirit really isn't very high on a weapon and the bonus sp easily wins. But on normal armor slots, it seems a little trickier. I'm inclined to think the properly itemized 346 one would win, but it seems hard to tell.

Interesting enough, I just had that situation happen to me. I was equipped with:

Belt of Barred Clouds
Item level 346
337 Stamina
205 Intellect
150 Spirit
130 Haste rating
Blue Socket (+ 10 Haste rating socket bonus)

and what dropped from the Conclave of Winds encounter was this:

Tempest Keeper Belt of the Flashfire
Item Level 359
429 Stamina
266 Intellect
180 Haste rating
180 Critical Strike rating
Yellow Socket (+ 10 Intellect socket bonus)

After reforging the Crit to 72 Spirit (with 108 Crit left on it), my stat differential were (and going from an Int/Spirit gem to an Int/Haste gem in the gem slot to activiate socket bonus):

Stamina = + 92
Intellect = + 71
Spirit = - 98
Haste = + 60
Critical = + 180

Now, my saving grace in this exchange was that I was already sitting at 2200 Spirit so I felt that the loss of 100 Spirit in order to gain all the other stats was worth it (because I have an unscienctific notion in my mind that my bottom cap that I want to be at on Spirit is 2000).

However, if I had been at 1800 Spirit, the loss of 100 Spirit might outweight the positive gain of all the other stats. It would have been a much tricker decision.

That being said, I still plan on grinding my Ramaken rep up to Exalted so that I can purchase the Spirit/Haste 359 epic belt and have an either/or choice. This belt is obviously better short term throughput at the expense of long term endurance.

It may end up being a plan where we start building different gear sets (like tanks do) for different fights and situations. I never really had to do that before since my best output stat (Intellect/SP) was also my best regen stat (Intellect).

Now, it may be that I will keep an eye on collecting both a Spirit set as well as a non-Spirit set so that I can craft my stats better towards the type of fight we are heading towards.

Cheers,

Thanks, Thad.

If that is pretty representative of the trade off, it seems like a poorly itemized higher ilvl will always win simply by brute force of the extra int. On 2nd thought, a 359 Mast/Crit item probably wouldn't be an upgrade over a 346 Spi/Haste one.

I was crunching numbers for my shaman's elemental set, and the upgrade from the BoE 359 chest and belt was so slight over a properly itemized 346, that for me it wasn't worth the expense (for an offset). I almost bought them thinking they were going to be a huge upgrade.

I know they were trying to simplify gearing choices a little by making primary stats (agi/str/int/sta) a little more important, but it seems like they're overemphasized. Once I took the time to figure out which socket bonsus are worth going for and which weren't, I was surprised that (at least for my elemen shaman set), in more cases than not, it's best to gem straight int. I'll be curious to crunch out numbers for resto once I can find some reliable stat weights.

Aanar wrote:Thanks, Thad.

If that is pretty representative of the trade off, it seems like a poorly itemized higher ilvl will always win simply by brute force of the extra int. On 2nd thought, a 359 Mast/Crit item probably wouldn't be an upgrade over a 346 Spi/Haste one.

I would agree....had the epic belt had a Mast/Crit combo, then I am pretty sure that I would have passed on it because I rate those secondary stats far, far behind Spirit and Haste. Even the extra Intellect would not have made that a good trade off.

But, I would dare say that if the up-tier item has either Spirit or Haste on it (regardless of the other stat), then it is always going to be an upgrade over a lower tier piece....even if it has the prized Spirit/Haste combo.

Cheers,

sherck wrote:I would dare say that if the up-tier item has either Spirit or Haste on it (regardless of the other stat), then it is always going to be an upgrade over a lower tier piece....even if it has the prized Spirit/Haste combo.

This seems like a pretty good rule of thumb. Thanks!

I can get upto 3K casting MP5 with elixir, food and raid buffs (and like 4.3k non-casting MP5). It is nice, but I also get an MP5 benefit from the larger mana pool that Int provides. So I don't think that one needs to pursue the spirit cap. Interestingly, when I use a feast that is stam + some other stat, it always chooses intellect over spirit.

Both seal of Insight and Divine Plea work off of mana pool size, so more int = more mana recovery if you actively use those abilities.

I would argue that the addage that "if you have mana at the end of the fight that you enough spirit" is probably incorrect. Spirit and int seem far and away the best way for healers to increase throughput. More throughput means there's more fights you can do with 2 healers instead of 3 for 10 man, or that you can drop a healer or two for 25 man. The exception I could see would be encounters where you need x healers due to burst requirements but are given plenty of time to regen between them. But even then, more spirit would let you use more flash of light over divine light to increas your burst

Even in 5 man, you're first trying to meet the throughput to beat the encounter and after that you're just trying to balance efficiency vs safety. (If I'm efficient, I'll end the pack with 80%+ mana so we can move immediaetly to the next pack with little if any drinking vs if I use flash of light liberly, it's more unlikely for anyone to die, but I'll definetly have to drink and if I run oom, will only be left with HL. More spirit lets you up the safety.

As someone else said, it is kind of sad that spirit will always be much better than haste/crit/mastery until we get to the point of being able to spam the highest HP/s spell(s) like wotlk. On the one hand they did say they're trying to make gearing decisions easier for casuals to understand. But on the other, it would be nice if the int gear w/o spirit (or hit obviosuly) was more useful to healers. (And it really stinks to see your tier gear not have spirit on it)

I really need to replace the haste/crit cloak and neck I have on my priest. =/ I was aiming for the 359 mastery/crit neck from wildhammer, but after this thread, I'm starting to think the 346 spirit/mastery neck from justice points would be better.

Aanar wrote:

sherck wrote:I would dare say that if the up-tier item has either Spirit or Haste on it (regardless of the other stat), then it is always going to be an upgrade over a lower tier piece....even if it has the prized Spirit/Haste combo.

This seems like a pretty good rule of thumb. Thanks!

I'm having some second thoughts on this. (It might hold for paladins.) I found a pretty good discussion on the priest forum for PlusHeal with quite a bit of testing. I was thinking spirit was quite a bit behind int, but for priests at least now int and spirit are close enough that they're practically equal. (Granted this is only while they're boosted in combat regen lasts till 4.0.6) It seems like it's due to the lower spell coefficients that heals have this time around so we no longer have the wotlk paradigm of maxing spell power over everything else.

Basically, I'm thinking now that all healers really really want to make sure to have spirit on all pieces such that a higher tier item w/o spirit probably isn't an upgrade especially if the lower tier is the optimal itemization (S/H for pal and sham, S/M for holy priest, not sure what druids and disc like). [Sad note: resto shaman tier 11 chest has no spirit! /boggle]

For a quick estimate when comparing gear now, I just add the int and spirit together for each item (considering gemming and reforging) to see which one is probably better. Only if the difference is close (~15 points) do I really consider if the one with less int & spirit has better secondary stats (master/haste/crit).

I notice a difference (I can be more liberal with mana and thus use flash heal occasionally, etc) if I add 200 spirit or int, but its hard to tell when when adding haste/crit/mastery. The ratings conversions are just too brutal. Well haste can be noticeable too, but I always try to remember the speed boost doesn't do anything to my hp/mp numbers.

I still haven't got any raiding done, but from 5-man experience regen is godly. As I've geared up, I just find myself not casting HL as much. If an injured dps is > 50% health I wait out HS cooldown and use that, or wait until he gets hurt a bit more, DL and move on. For the tank, again, I generally wait until a DL would not be over-heal and use that. With good regen you can also spam FoL for a few seconds if something goes bad and recover after. Not spamming HL and being able to FoL when required really reduce the relative value of haste (it's still a good stat, but nothing like it was in WotLK).

Now that I have raided a couple of weeks (have Halfus, V&T, Magmaw, Conclave and BT down), I can say that my experience is tending towards this kind of weighting:

Intellect > Spirit >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Crit = Haste >>>>>>>>>>>>>> Mastery

I concur now that Spirit is almost equal in weighting to Intellect.

In my opinion, both have now become both "throughput" and "regen" stats because more Intellect gives you all the normal stuff (higher initial mana for regen, higher SP for throughput, Crit for throughput, etc) and Spirit now gives you more ability to cast FoL/DL more times which is your throughput increase.

Mastery just seem to be completely.....a non-factor in my gameplay. I rarely notice a bubble. Yeah, yeah, the little symbol shows up on my frames and....oh, wait, it is gone now... Sure, WoL shows some absorbs but it is such a small percentage of my overall "healing" that I just don't see it.

Crit and Haste, on the other hand, still seems to be a gameplay changer.

Crit increases my throughput by a whole 9% (with Conviction) and perhaps, perhaps allows me to not cast that next spell if a crit happens that does enough to keep that DPS at an "acceptable" level of health.

As for Haste, not counting the faster tick time of Holy Radiance, when I cast a Holy Light while in my questing/farming Ret spec, I NOTICE how long it is (little Haste, no -0.5 sec talent) while in Holy, I press HL/DL and then decide where my next cast is going and press it knowing my HL/DL is done/about done.

So, I guess my "new" rule of thumb says:

If the piece has Spirit on it, upgrade. The weighting of the other stats will not matter in the face of the increased amount of Intellect and Spirit on the up-tier piece.

Crit and Haste are better than Mastery as the "other" stat on equal-tier pieces.

If the piece has no Spirit on it, avoid it unless it is equal to or greater than a 2 Tier (26 Item Level) upgrade. Even then, I like the whole "add Intellect plus Spirit together and if they are close or equal, upgrade for the addition of the other secondary stats" that someone mentioned upstream.

Cheers,

Hmm. So saying that you would take:

[Winking Eye of Love] - 168 int, 109 spi, 114 crit

over:

[Lightning Flash Pendant] - 190 int, 127 crit, 127 mast

If you consider mastery junk, and reforge, you get +22 int, -59 spi, +13 crit from the epic.

I guess I should roll need on that blue tonight. Besides the stats, the name is far more epic.

rodos wrote:Hmm. So saying that you would take:

[Winking Eye of Love] - 168 int, 109 spi, 114 crit

over:

[Lightning Flash Pendant] - 190 int, 127 crit, 127 mast

If you consider mastery junk, and reforge, you get +22 int, -59 spi, +13 crit from the epic.

I guess I should roll need on that blue tonight. Besides the stats, the name is far more epic.

I would, yes.

While the extra Intellect and Crit are good, the downgrade of Spirit is, in my opinion, a killer. If I have the mana (which will be provided by Spirit during an encounter), then my throughput increase is by casting more FoL and DL over my "normal" rotation of HS/HL/WoG/DR.

I don't believe my throughput increase comes from more Haste for faster Holy Light. I comes from FoL/DL and that is only sustained by more mana from Spirit.

Others may be trending another direction, but I am basing my opinion on both my observations from my (abit, limited) raiding experience AND from how Blizzard allocated stats on the Tier-11 gear.

I think there is a reason that none of the Tier pieces no not have Haste on them and I don't think it is because Blizzard hates us. I think it is because they want to try to "force" more Healadins into the style of play that they have redesigned the spec for and I think this is it.

Cheers,

[EDIT: Because English is HARD!]

I figured I would weigh in on this discussion as someone who has swapped from tanking to holy full-time since the end of Wrath and has done extensive raiding/testing on the subject. Firstly, there seems to be some confusion amongst everyone here about stat weightings, and it is important to stress that it is nearly impossible to have accurate weightings because they depend on playstyle and vary dramatically with gear. I will however attempt to summarise my experience and what seems to be the experience of many from EJ and paragon in particular:

Firstly, int is king still, and is often worth ignoring socket bonuses in order to maximise it. After spirit, haste is king of secondary stats and in many cases can come before spirit (you will see most of us using the band of secret names and reforging the crit to spirit as haste/spirit rings are hard to come by). There are "soft caps" to haste where the value of haste increases momentarily as you approach, which are the holy radiance breakpoints.

#Ticks Haste Needed Rating DF Heroism DF + Hero Duration
10 0.0% 0.0% 0 0 0 0 10.00
11 5.0% 0.0% 0 0 0 0 10.48
12 15.0% 0.0% 0 0 0 0 10.43
13 25.0% 6.0% 773.1 0 0 0 10.40
14 35.0% 14.5% 1859.4 0 0 0 10.37
15 45.0% 23.0% 2945.7 320.4 0 0 10.34
16 55.0% 31.5% 4032.0 1225.7 146.4 0 10.32
17 65.0% 40.0% 5118.3 2130.9 982.0 0 10.30
18 75.0% 48.5% 6204.6 3036.2 1817.6 0 10.29
19 85.0% 56.9% 7290.9 3941.4 2653.2 76.7 10.27
20 95.0% 65.4% 8377.2 4846.7 3488.8 773.1 10.26
21 105.0% 73.9% 9463.5 5751.9 4324.4 1469.4 10.24
22 115.0% 82.4% 10549.8 6657.2 5160.1 2165.8 10.23
23 125.0% 90.9% 11636.1 7562.4 5995.7 2862.1 10.22
24 135.0% 99.3% 12722.4 8467.7 6831.3 3558.5 10.21

This is taken directly from Elitist jerks, with full credit to Nodrak with a source of http://elitistjerks.com/f76/t110847-hol ... ompendium/ .
As you can see from, admittedly the poorly formatted, table haste rating has some interesting breaks with holy radiance, which is a significant heal in the majority of raids, give or take a few like halfus. What is important is realising that these are so plentiful that you can't really view them as caps at all, but it might be worth bearing in mind if you find yourself with 1850 haste rating that getting an extra 10 from somewhere would give you an entire tick extra.

As mentioned, there is no spirit cap that is calculable. You need enough (along with intellect, remembering that intellect increases the value of spirit) to keep you going out of mana using a reasonable throughput for the requirements. As for myself, I currently raid 25 man heroics (just started yesterday and killed Halfus after 16 pulls) and I find mana not being overly stressful, although I am significantly more mana efficient/healing done compared to our other holy paladins. With the mana tide nerf however, mana will become more stressful, but I don't think damage in heroics is allowing you to overly prio spirit over haste. You can check my armory at http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/a ... a/advanced and my logs at http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/ub271vui1007pqgc/ for a better understanding of how I gear and play for the content I'm at (maintain the thought though that holy radiance for most other fights is a much more significant part of healing done, other than Chimaeron). One thing to note is that I already have a large proportion of divine lights in order to keep up with damage on tanks in the encounter, and have a roughly even amount of healing done through FoL and HL purely because spikes need to be beaten with FoL.

TL;DR

Int >>>Spirit=/>Haste>>>>>>Crit>>>>>>>>>>>>Mastery for myself.

As a final note, don't use the tier gear, its badly itemised and other classes will gain far more from it. The best gear you can get will be int/spirit/haste gear with ideally no reforging, but if you look at my armory posted earlier you can get a good idea of interim gear.

EDIT: To address the OP, haste will always be better than crit. Spirit will always remain better than crit with hardmode damage and MTT nerfs. Consider Crit and Mastery as junk.

Minarva wrote:TL;DR

Int >>>Spirit=/>Haste>>>>>>Crit>>>>>>>>>>>>Mastery for myself.

As a final note, don't use the tier gear, its badly itemised and other classes will gain far more from it. The best gear you can get will be int/spirit/haste gear with ideally no reforging, but if you look at my armory posted earlier you can get a good idea of interim gear.

EDIT: To address the OP, haste will always be better than crit. Spirit will always remain better than crit with hardmode damage and MTT nerfs. Consider Crit and Mastery as junk.

Point #1: I totally agree that Haste makes Holy Radiance better; no doubt about it. 773 Haste is dead easy to get in 346 gear. 1859 Haste is a bit of a stretch that you will have to work on to get (reforge, enchant and/or gem for it). 2945 Haste seems out of reach at the moment; perhaps if you are fully 359/372 geared you could hit it but in my current gearing of 345, it is out of reach.

Point #2: Have you raided as a 10-man?

My perception would be in Cata that as a 25-man healer (which I have not done), you have the potential luxury of "job-sharing" healing assignments and being able to maxize your efficiency over, perhaps, your throughput. If you can do your healing assignment with primarily HS/HL/WoG/HR/LoD (our "efficient" spell set) and only resort to using FoL/DL on, say, 1 out of 7 casts or greater (casting FoL/DL once for every 7 other healing spells cast or less often), then maximizing Haste is probably going to do you very well. More Haste means more Holy Light and Holy Radiance, means shorter GCD for Holy Shock means more WoG/LoD casts.

However, I can tell you that as a 10-man raider with a raid group that is getting bosses down but in no way overgear any of the encounters yet (except BH boss), my cast rate of FoL/DL is more like 1 out of every 4 heals casts rather than 1 out of 7 or 8 or 9 because the throughput is just brutal. If I was using the "efficiency" cast set, my heal targets would be eating dirt.

And Haste has little effect on FoL (already fast enough) and while it would help the cast time of Divine Light, I don't really want to be casting it faster because that means I am going OOM faster.

Haste just seems to lose a TON of its appeal if you are casting FoL and DL to increase your throughput.

Point #3: How much do you FoL in raid?

My point being is that if your response to that question is "yuck, FoL sucks and I never use it" then I would submit that your play style is MUCH different than mine. I have to FoL raid members in order to save them from death because if I tried to just use Holy Light (even hasted), it would be too slow and too small of a heal to save them.

Point #4: If I am going to use FoL/DL to increase my throughput (instead of trying to stack haste in order to increase my throughput via Holy Light), then I need more mana and better in combat regen. Thus, I need more Spirit and Intellect and should do everything I can to maximize those two stats.

TL:DR

I wonder about if the whole "Haste is best after Intellect and perhaps Spirit" crowd are primarily 25-man healers (I know the majority of EJ posters are. I keep up with the thread on a daily basis). I think that model fits 25-man raiding much, much better than 10-man raiding.

My observation in 10-man raiding is that there is too much responsibilty for both tank healing and raid healing for any individual healer to not have to consider throughput over efficiency at certain phases of the fight. And to do that, I think that Holy Light cannot be maxized enough to be the "go to" heal for 10-man, FoL and DL will be used and if you do that, Haste loses a ton of its appeal.

I am doing this week's raid having reforged everything away from Haste to Crit and removing Tower of Radiance from my build (with Blessed Life, Eternal Glory and Pursuit of Justice maxxed for Holy Power generation). I will be interested in comparing logs this week to my performance in past weeks in order to see how things compare.

Cheers,

I wonder how much of the difference in experiences is due to those that have +spirit on use trinkets and combine it with the current mana tide totem and those that don't.

The two that I know of off-hand are the JC dream owl and the one for 1650 valor points. I image those that are working on heroic raids certainly have the valor point ones whereas people just getting going (like me 2/12) do not unless they're a JC.

I know when my resto shaman got her JC owl it made a world of difference.

sherck wrote:However, I can tell you that as a 10-man raider with a raid group that is getting bosses down but in no way overgear any of the encounters yet (except BH boss), my cast rate of FoL/DL is more like 1 out of every 4 heals casts rather than 1 out of 7 or 8 or 9 because the throughput is just brutal. If I was using the "efficiency" cast set, my heal targets would be eating dirt.

My observation in 10-man raiding is that there is too much responsibilty for both tank healing and raid healing for any individual healer to not have to consider throughput over efficiency at certain phases of the fight. And to do that, I think that Holy Light cannot be maxized enough to be the "go to" heal for 10-man, FoL and DL will be used and if you do that, Haste loses a ton of its appeal.

I'm a 10 man raider. The only fight I healed on this week was Valiona, but that was with another Holy Paladin (so I'm using him as the basis for comparison here, rather than me, since he is objectively a better Holy Paladin than I am). He managed 12k HPS, while casting 7 Flash of Lights over the nearly 6 minute kill (or 3.1% of his total healing done), and 0 Divine Lights. By happy coincidence, I also cast only 7 FoLs (4.1% of my total healing) and 0 Divine Lights.

From memory, the only times I used FoL were to quickly top someone up who was caught by the flame breath thing, to quickly top someone up who had positioned themselves badly and hence was out of range of the healers for a long time, and to quickly heal some people who were low when a meteor was incoming. Those situations where someone was only a second or two from death were few and far between, and it was rarer still to have such a situation which didn't coincide with Holy Shock being (almost) off cooldown. I don't think it's true to say that 10 man raiders are necessarily forced to use more FoL or DL casts purely because of that raid size, at least in my experience.

Epimer wrote:I'm a 10 man raider. The only fight I healed on this week was Valiona, but that was with another Holy Paladin (so I'm using him as the basis for comparison here, rather than me, since he is objectively a better Holy Paladin than I am). He managed 12k HPS, while casting 7 Flash of Lights over the nearly 6 minute kill (or 3.1% of his total healing done), and 0 Divine Lights. By happy coincidence, I also cast only 7 FoLs (4.1% of my total healing) and 0 Divine Lights.

From memory, the only times I used FoL were to quickly top someone up who was caught by the flame breath thing, to quickly top someone up who had positioned themselves badly and hence was out of range of the healers for a long time, and to quickly heal some people who were low when a meteor was incoming. Those situations where someone was only a second or two from death were few and far between, and it was rarer still to have such a situation which didn't coincide with Holy Shock being (almost) off cooldown. I don't think it's true to say that 10 man raiders are necessarily forced to use more FoL or DL casts purely because of that raid size, at least in my experience.

That is good stuff, thanks for sharing. 3 thoughts:

1. 12k HPS? Holy crud; I can only do about 8.5k - 9.0k HPS. Granted, we are still 3 healing all the fights so if we went with 2 healer it would be different but that is some very fine healing; especially since he did not resort to using DL at all and FoL very little.

2. V&T is not a very healing intensive fight; i.e. you rarely have to heal someone up quickly to get ready for the next boss mechanic. The couple of primary mechanics are all execution based and if your raid is doing it correctly, there are very few "oh crud" moments in that fight. Also, tank damage is not very high without the mechanics.

Phase 1: If you all crash together on the dragon's tail to split the damage, Holy Radiance completely takes care of the damage (especially if you have 2 Healadins using it). You can avoid the majority of the flame breath just by reacting quickly. If you stay spread out at ranged, you rarely have to heal quickly from the attack that chains.

Phase 2: Yeah, the ranged group takes some damage but it is not a ton and easily healed through with the use your "efficient" spells.

Transition: Left, middle, right. Raid member responsibility to react correctly. Typically, not healing intensive.

As long as your raid is doing the mechanics correctly, there is very few times on V&T where multiple "specials" are happening at one time and take people to critical health levels.

3. All of my earlier theory and discussion on the relative worth of Haste is so much Bull Chit. I ran some Heroics yesterday and my HPS were almost 2k lower than they had been in my Haste maximized setup. At current gearing levels, FoL cannot be used as much as I was thinking it could be in order to get "fast" heals off and the cast time of Holy Light or Divine Light without the Haste were....terrible. There is no way to react to damage fast enough.

SO, Mea Culpa, my theory was wrong and I have reforged back to Haste (900 without reforging to it, 1700 with reforging to it).

Stat weighting should continue to be:

Intellect >>>>>>>>>>>>> Spirit > Haste >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Crit > Mastery

Cheers,

sherck wrote:
1. 12k HPS? Holy crud; I can only do about 8.5k - 9.0k HPS. Granted, we are still 3 healing all the fights so if we went with 2 healer it would be different but that is some very fine healing; especially since he did not resort to using DL at all and FoL very little.

We three-healed it but honestly two would have been plenty. He was at 12k, I was at 8k and our new resto shaman was at 6.5k. Those lower numbers are, I think, a reflection of the fact that we didn't need three healers and low HPS is a reflection of not much more healing needed.

For a bigger sample size from this week's raids (data for the other guy, not me, as he's better and actually healed all of these fights whereas I was tanking):

Atramedes - 11k HPS, 11 FoL (6.9%), 0 DL.
Cho'gall, averaged over 9 wipes since we didn't get a kill - ~11k HPS, 87 FoL (3.2%), 17 DL (1.0%).
Conclave - 7.3k HPS, 7 FoL (4.9%), 0 DL.
Halfus - 8k HPS, 8 FoL (3.5%), 1 DL (0.6%).
Twilight Ascendant Council - 12.7k HPS, 24 FoL (13.8%), 0 DL.
Magmaw - 12k HPS, 11 FoL (3.9%), 0 DL.
Omnotron - 10.5k HPS, 18 FoL, (7.6%), 1 DL (0.7%).
Maloriak - 9k HPS, 9 FoL (6.2%), 0 DL.

So really the only fight in which FoL was a significant portion of his healing was our Twilight Council kill. This week, however, we had no interrupts in Feludius in P1 (well, we had me, but I was terrible at it and stopped maybe 1 bolt going off) which would necessitate heavier FoL usage to stabilise someone. And also P3 is a bit spammy. Overall it was a sloppier kill than usual and I imagine that would necssarily up the FoL usage.